tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post949183866879639515..comments2017-08-17T20:40:27.900-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Fragments Shattered by HistoryJeffrey Cohenhttps://plus.google.com/110433684739546897626noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50555416697359282682008-02-17T14:43:00.000-05:002008-02-17T14:43:00.000-05:00Hi Karl,Thank you for the comments and the suggest...Hi Karl,<BR/><BR/>Thank you for the comments and the suggestions. I will definitely look up the Biddick and Klosowska you've recommended. I think you are quite right in going deeper into the Xtn/Jewish comparison, especially how the Jews were perceived to be cannibals themselves. <BR/><BR/>William Arens, and the <I>Cannibalism in the Colonial World</I> collection (ed. Hulme and Barker), have remained important touchstones to my work on Andreas, especially working out the spatial, temporal and economic distortions of inherent in thinking about man-eating. I would like to keep that sense of extimite that Mermedonians invoke without perhaps having to go so far as to say that Mermedonia is England. I am especially interested in how Arens' <I>The Man-Eating Myth</I> works together with Johannes Fabian's <I>Times and the Other</I> in creating a critique of how the comparative sense of time is integral with imagined food practice. If we can read a people's place in time by the way they eat, then perhaps time travel is as simple as choosing the right thing to have for lunch... (maybe that's a bit too wacky).<BR/><BR/>And, in response to your last idea: I would totally agree that the comparison between the Phoenix and the Mermedonians dissolves the notion of the cycle. The big difference in the scale of time between moments of consumption--1,000 years for the Phoenix, 30 days for the Mermedonians--suggests a switch in emphasis from the large-scale cosmological sense of history to the microcosm of practice, a smaller-scale view of embodied time. So yes, the comparison reveals "two incompatible forces both simultaneously present" as you say, but only so far as practice is invisible to the larger cyclical movement. Perhaps then the comparison that the <I>Andreas</I>-author makes between the Mermedonians and <I>The Phoenix</I> is an attempt to pull down the macrocosmic narrative of historical progress to the level where human action matters where change is not seen as inevitability or Progress.<BR/><BR/>Have a safe trip. All the best,<BR/>AaronSecret Guineahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02353350813826497618noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65896396168989264852008-02-16T23:33:00.000-05:002008-02-16T23:33:00.000-05:00Compelled to leave my own comments on the paper. I...Compelled to leave my own comments on the paper. If it were expanded into a full paper, I have all manner of ambitions for it. Written on the plane:<BR/><BR/>There are a few things I'd like to see happen in this paper.<BR/><BR/>First, a deeper problematization of Christianity as the telos of Judaism. One might look here at Kathleen Biddick's deployment of the cannibal metaphor to typify the relationship of medieval Christianity w/ Judaism.<BR/><BR/>Second, deeper consideration of the various metaphors of displacement in anthropophagous imaginary. The anthropophage tends to be discovered in extimité as much as in distant others. For one key--and appallingly symptomatic--treatment of the animal/paleo-anthropological past in the anthropophagous imaginary, see Wilhelm Stekel, "Cannibalism, Necrophilism, and Vampirism," in <I>Sadism and Masochism.</I> 1929. Trans. Louise Brink. NY: Grove P, 1965. 2: 248-330. (other essential anthropophagy bib includes Maggie Kilgour, <I>From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Consumption.</I> Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990, and William Arens (here you might as well start with "Cooking the Cannibals," in <I>Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety.</I> Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace, eds. Manchester: Mandolin, 1998. 157-66.)<BR/><BR/>Third, as a possibility, and to propel the interesting discussion of textual repetition in directions not available to scholars coming out of the oral formulaic hermeneutic, the paper might look to the work on manuscript pastiche and transvestism in Anna Kłosowska, <I>Queer Love in the Middle Ages</I> (Palgrave, 2005), Chapter 2 "Dissection and Desire: Cross-Dressing and the Fashioning of Lesbian Identity," 69-116 (esp 76 and 91-92). With this material, you might get an "an aesthetics of segmentation and reuse" (92) rather than one of introjection and melancholy, one oriented, that is, toward present products/productivity instead of towards the impossible pastness of the past. I don't mean to say that "flat time" is theoretically better than (complicated) relationships of past(s) and present(s); I mean only to say that the Kłosowska might suggest something different.<BR/><BR/>Finally, and this is just a bug in my butt, I'm wondering if thinking about how the <I>Andreas</I> anthropophages and the Phoenix together breaks the Phoenix out of notions of cyclicality. That is, can we think of this bird as not representing the relationship of past to present, but rather as representing two incompatible forces both simultaneously present? This gets us a Zizekian (anti)foundational mode of insurmountable conflict, which might be more interesting, or at least something different from, the (undead?) temporal logic of the cycle.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com